The Flat Earth Society has members around the globe. Huh?
There are still people who believe, (I think pretend for shits & giggles) the Earth is flat.
I remember drugs that made me think the Earth was all kinds of shapes… but I digress.
For 2,000 years educated people have know the Earth is round… hmm guest that leaves out much of facebook, twitter, 4chan…
But knowing the Earth is round, and hearing of far off places, didn’t help figuring out what the Earth looked like.

Quote:

The famous British cartographer and former Member of Parliament, James Wyld, had a brilliant plan to promote his mapmaking business. The Great Exhibition was slated for 1851, at Hyde Park in London, and would be visited by prominent industrialists, scientist, and artists from around the world, as well as members of the Royal family. Wyld figured if he could create a huge model of the earth with an accurate depiction of earth’s geography, for the exhibition, it could further his chances of scoring new business deals and increasing sales.

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Wyld approached the organizing committee of the Great Exhibition with the idea, but was disappointed to learn that the pavilion being erected for the Great Exhibition—the Crystal Palace—was too small to house his proposed 60-feet-tall globe. Besides, the organizers weren’t too fond of Wyld trying to use the Exhibition as a mean to promote his business, and his proposal was rejected. Undaunted, Wyld began to search for an alternate location and found Leicester Square a suitable site for his project. After a rather complicated series of negotiations with the owners of the gardens, permission was granted to build the globe there and keep it for 10 years.

Now if you want to draw people in you don’t put the hoochie coochie girls on the outside...
Step inside! Hello! We've a most amazing show
You'll enjoy it all we know
Step inside! Step inside!

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Wyld's Great Globe was not a regular globe. It was hollow with the earth’s geography represented on the interior surface rather than on the outside. A series of platforms connected by staircases on the inside allowed visitors to marvel at every square inch of the gigantic relief map of mountains and rivers, built to scale, but vertically exaggerated to make them perceptible. Fertile land was colored green and deserts in sandy yellow. Volcanoes were shown erupting dramatically using dyed cotton wool for lava and smoke, while snowy mountains were sprinkled with white crystals that sparkled brilliantly in the gas light.

You can see a 20th/21st century version, the Mapparium in Boston.

Not as big, but it covers the ground, and easier to see up close and personal. Plus easier to change political boundries.

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Yes, the point of building this was to educate people as to the locations, the relationship between places people had only heard of. On the outside of a large globe you can only see snippets of those relationships.

I'm puzzled by this. I would have expected to see all the land areas back to front when viewed from the inside.
It's analogous to the view from inside a shop which has sign writing on the window, you'll see it all backwards.

If you have a 9 meter diameter glass ball you can paint a map on the outside to be viewed from the outside, or you can paint a map on the inside to be viewed from the inside.

(Yeah it can be painted on either side to be viewed from the opposite side but regardless.)

If viewed from the outside you can only see a small portion, but from the inside you can see the relationship between the land masses. That's what Wyld and the Mapparium were trying to accomplish. Plus it's dryer if it rains.